More dislikes than likes for Modi live streams — what stats show and how BJP sees it

Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
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The live stream videos on PM Modi’s official YouTube channel seem to be facing a new response trend — dislikes dominating likes.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

New Delhi: On Monday, the live stream of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s address at the inaugural session of Governor’s Conference on National Education Policy Monday saw a response that seems to be becoming a trend with his online videos — dislikes dominating likes.

The video saw 12,000 dislikes against 11,000 likes during the live stream. Over the next couple of hours, the likes figure surged ahead, but just about.

This came on the back of two worse occurrences over the last week.

The PM’s monthly address Mann Ki Baat on 30 August and then his interaction with IPS probationers later garnered a similar response, with the former topping the dislike metric among his videos at a staggering 283,000 (against 211,000 likes). The latter met with 29,000 dislikes (28,000 likes).

This trend of growing dislikes compared to likes is clearly discernible in the wake of the NEET-JEE controversy, which has seen vocal students call for postponement of the scheduled exams this month even as the Modi government has refused the demand.

ThePrint scanned 105 videos live streamed this year on the official YouTube channel of PM Modi — not to be confused with the PMO India channel. Only the two videos mentioned above have earned more dislikes — both came after the row broke out.

Of these, the Mann Ki Baat episode is the most disliked (as well as liked) on the channel, with the highest number of ratings. In the address, which can be read here, the PM chose not to talk about the NEET-JEE row, or the students’ demand.

While this kind of response is a sort of novelty on the PM’s official channel, the BJP has blamed the Congress for a “conspiracy” to target the channel.

BJP spokesperson Bizay Sonkar Shastri said it is an organised Congress conspiracy, and most of the dislikes are from outside India, even from countries where there is no presence of Indians.

Earlier, the party’s IT cell in-charge Amit Malviya had said that only 2 per cent of the dislikes on the Mann Ki Baat video were from India, the rest 98 per cent were bots, pinning the blame on Congress leader Rahul Gandhi.


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